Quotes About Nonlinearities

You can't navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.

Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For

in the presence of nonlinearities, the longer the forecast the worse its accuracy.

In other words, it was a much more linear economy—less complex—than today. And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today's world.

Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. This is why there are routes to success that are nonrandom, but very few people have the mental stamina to follow them.

I prefer to remain a skeptic. People frequently misinterpret my opinion. I never said that every rich man is an idiot and every unsuccessful person unlucky, only that in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one's judgment. It is safer. Ten • LOSER TAKES ALL—ON THE NONLINEARITIES OF LIFE The nonlinear viciousness of life.

Small nonlinearities were easy to disregard. People who conduct experiments learn quickly that they live in an imperfect world.

We've seen that even in the simplest situations nonlinearities can interfere with a linear approach to aggregates. That point holds in general: nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging.